Scaling of plantarflexor muscle activity and postural time-to-contact in response to upper-body perturbations in young and older adults

Abstract

In this study, we describe and compare the compensatory responses of healthy young and older adults to sequentially increasing upper-body perturbations. The scaling of plantarflexor muscular activity and minimum time-to-contact (TtC(MIN)) was examined, and we determined whether TtC(MIN) predictions of instability (stepping transitions) for the older subjects were similar to those we previously reported for younger subjects (Hasson et al. in J Biomech 41:2121-2129, 2008). We found that the older subjects stepped at a lower perturbation level than the younger subjects; however, this response was appropriate based on their greater center of mass (CoM) accelerations, which may have been caused by differences in pre-perturbation states between the age groups. Although the CoM acceleration increased linearly with perturbation magnitude, the amount of gastrocnemius and soleus muscular activity increased nonlinearly in both age groups. There were no differences in the maximum plantarflexor torque responses, suggesting that the maximum torque capabilities of the older subjects were not limiting factors. As previously demonstrated in the younger subjects, the older subjects showed a quadratic decrease in TtC(MIN) with increasing perturbation magnitude. The vertices of the quadratics gave accurate predictions of stepping transitions in both age groups, even though the older subjects stepped at lower perturbation magnitudes. By probing the postural system's behavior through sequentially increasing upper-body perturbations, we observed a complementary nonlinear scaling of muscle activity and TtC(MIN), which suggests that subjects could use TtC or a correlate as an informational variable to help determine whether a step is necessary.